


Pick a Word

by Wilusa



Category: Carnivale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-06
Updated: 2011-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-14 11:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/148962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wilusa/pseuds/Wilusa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A speculative take on Ben's backstory with the chain gang, written after Season One. It's inconsistent with what we now know was Daniel Knauf's intent, but probably not with anything we saw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: Carnivale and its canon characters are the property of HBO and the show's producers; no copyright infringement is intended.

Nightmare Man was screaming again.

Not the one with the tattoos, the _other_ Nightmare Man.

Ben Hawkins screamed right back at him. "Shut yer hole, damn you! Lemme alone!"

Nightmare Man kept it up. He was yelling one word over and over, though it made no sense at all.

Ben tried to drown him out. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

And then something crashed into Ben.

More accurately, _he_ crashed into the bunkhouse floor, having been flung out of bed. He woke with a start, just in time to roll and evade the kick Bull Teufel aimed at his head. The guard bellowed, " _You_ shut up, asshole!"

A few of the other prisoners gave halfhearted cheers. Most remained silent. Evidently, they'd side with one of their own against Teufel even if their fellow con's nightmares had been keeping them awake.

Ben sat up cautiously, not even trying to dodge a weaker kick that caught him in the hip. He knew Teufel had to get that one in, to save face.

The guard watched him struggle back into bed, hampered by the short chain connecting his leg irons. For his part, he didn't risk looking directly at Teufel. Why antagonize 250 pounds of solid muscle? But he saw out of the corner of his eye that the man wore an evil smirk, and he didn't have to wait long to learn why. As soon as he'd gotten his aching body resettled in the bed, Teufel hauled him out of it and threw him on the floor again. "It's time to get up, you scumbags!"

As he grasped the bed and wearily pulled himself to his feet, Ben reflected that once again - just like all the other times - he couldn't remember the word Nightmare Man had been yelling at him.

 _Huh. He was prob'ly tellin' me, "Die!"_

x

x

x

After another day's backbreaking work in a quarry, Ben was too tired to resent the wretched excuse for an evening meal. It was, in fact, better than most of the ones he'd had in the months before his arrest. He'd occasionally managed to steal some decent food back then, but more often he'd scavenged from garbage cans.

Still, he knew how the other convicts regarded the food. As they were being herded back into the bunkhouse, he wasn't surprised to hear Whit Adams say, "Swill."

He _was_ surprised at how loudly Adams said it. Until guard Jesse Strack spun around and said belligerently, "Was that you, Hawkins?" Then he caught the sly look on Adams' face and thought, _Oh no. They cooked that up between them. Gives Strack an excuse to drag me outside an' beat me - he'll pay Adams off with a supply o' cigarettes, maybe even booze._

He guessed Adams was one of the cons who'd cheered his being roughed up that morning. Ben was the newest and youngest prisoner in the camp, and he'd already had to defend himself against worse than kicks.

"It warn't me!" he protested. But he knew denials wouldn't do him any good, so he didn't waste his breath saying it more than once.

Strack hauled him outside; just beyond the door, a leering Teufel was waiting. It was a toss-up which of the two was bigger and meaner. Ben figured that even if he wasn't hobbled by his chains and weak from malnutrition, he wouldn't stand a chance in a fight with either of them. So he decided not to resist the thrashing. When they threw him down, he curled into a ball, the better to absorb it without serious injury.

 _Just don't scream, don't make a sound. We're so close to the bunkhouse that everyone can hear. If they can't get a peep outta me, their pride will make them stop an' pretend they never meant to do much._

It was hard to stick to that plan when they began hitting him with clubs. But he gritted his teeth and reminded himself that the guards had orders not to break bones or leave permanent scars. An occasional injury could be explained as one prisoner's having hurt another, but even that was frowned on, because it implied they couldn't maintain order.

A beating, he could take.

But then one of them grabbed him from behind and started trying to pull his pants down.

 _Oh God, no!_

He summoned all his strength, rolled over, and gave his attacker - Teufel - a vicious kick in the groin, with both feet. Teufel stumbled backward, roaring like one of the bulls he was named for. But Strack smashed his club into the side of Ben's head, then picked him up bodily and hurled him against the bunkhouse wall. Ben's last thought before he blacked out was, _Dammit, it ain't no better to be raped while you're unconscious!_

Then, suddenly, he was fully conscious again. His head and his right arm hurt; to his relief, his rear end didn't. Even the pain he had was minor, quickly fading away.

Yet it seemed not much time had passed. He was still lying beside the wall, and he could hear both guards cursing.

Strack raged, "I think my arm is broke! I musta snapped somethin' when I picked that lowlife up an' threw him."

"I ain't feelin' so great neither," groused Teufel. "Along with gettin' kicked in the privates, I fell an' hit my head on somethin'. At least...I don't clearly remember, but the way it hurts now, I musta hit it."

"You seem to be in better shape than me," said Strack. "Take a look at the lowlife an' see how bad off he is, will you? I kinda lost it there, may've fractured his skull."

"Shit. I was lookin' to have some fun, gettin' a piece o' that young ass. Ain't up for it now, though."

Ben got to his feet as Teufel staggered over to him. He glared at the guard, but didn't speak.

"Hey, I guess he's tougher'n he looks, Jess! Can't be hurt much, the way he's actin'." While Strack, cradling his arm, let out another string of oaths, Teufel pushed Ben toward the door of the bunkhouse.

In the doorway, where everyone could see, he grabbed Ben by the hair and spat in his face.


	2. Chapter 2

Nightmare Man was screaming his accursed word again.

Ben didn't want to hear it. He covered his ears. "Go away! I don't want nothin' to do with you. Get outta my head!"

Someone who wasn't Nightmare Man pulled one of his hands away and shouted into the exposed ear, "There ain't no one in your head, bastard! Ain't no brains in there, neither!"

Jolted awake, Ben sat up and said a few choice words of his own to Teufel. The guard slapped him, hard - as he'd expected. He achieved the small victory of not letting his head snap back with the blow.

As epithets went in this place, "bastard" was tame. But on his first day, Ben had made the mistake of letting the guards see that it hurt him. They'd realized he really was a bastard, in the literal sense of the word, and they never let him live it down.

"Got a new buddy for you," Teufel snarled. He'd already rousted Mac Brodie out of the bed next to Ben's, and now he half-threw a sniffling boy onto it. "You get the prize location, Wooten! Next to the crazy man who howls in his sleep all night."

Ben squinted to see the kid called Wooten in the dim light. _Well, look what we have here. Younger'n me, looks like I could blow him off that bed if I breathed on him. It's about time I get replaced at the bottom o' the peckin' order._

Then he stopped, appalled at his own thoughts. _God Almighty. I ain't been here but three months, an' already I'm wishin' abuse on someone else. What am I turnin' into?_

He shuddered. As Teufel swaggered away, he said quietly to the kid, "I hope I won't keep you awake. I just have bad dreams - can't help it. But I ain't crazy, an' I don't mean you no harm. My name's Ben."

A shockingly young voice quavered, "Th-thank you, Ben. I'm Clem."

Ben dropped back on his own bed, with a weary "G'night, Clem."

As always, he'd forgotten Nightmare Man's stupid word.

As always, he didn't care.

x

x

x

In the days that followed, Ben tried to protect the boy, and succeeded fairly well. It seemed his unexpected toughness really had made an impression on the guards.

He usually didn't talk much, didn't ask questions of others because he didn't want them asking questions of him. But he couldn't help being curious about Clem Wooten.

"How long you in for?" he whispered one night as they lay in their side-by-side beds, both unable to get back to sleep after one of Ben's nightmares.

"T-ten years."

"Jeez, same as me. What did you do?"

"Stole a car."

"Hell," Ben muttered, "you don't look old enough to know how to _drive_ a car."

"I'm fifteen!" Clem said defensively. Then he admitted, "I figured it wouldn't be much diff'rent than a tractor. But I did crack it up. That's why I got caught."

"Why'd you steal it?" Ben asked him. "Just joy-ridin'?" _He's a kid, can't they see that? Takin' ten years of his life for a thing like that is the real crime._

" 'Course not! I took the car to go look for my sister, 'cuz she'd run off. Ma was worried sick about her."

"Your sister?" That put the incident in a new light. "How old is _she?_ "

Clem sighed. "Mary's eighteen. Old enough to have a right to leave home - I guess I shouldn't have said she 'run off.' The thing is, she was gonna hitchhike all the way to Tulsa, hopin' to find work there. Ma was sure she'd get herself raped an' strangled."

"So...your sister set out to hitchhike to Tulsa," Ben said slowly. "You stole a car 'cuz you wanted to protect her, but you wrecked the car an' wound up here. What happened to your sister?"

"She did get picked up by a piece o' trash what raped her, but at least he didn't strangle her. She made it to Tulsa. An' became a whore."

All Ben could say to that was "Oh."

x

x

x

After a long pause, Clem asked, "What about you?"

Ben had been hoping he wouldn't ask. _But he answered all my questions. Turnabout is fair play._

"Robbery," he said quietly. "I got caught tryin' to rob a grocer - not my first time, I'd been doin' it for months. 'Armed robbery with a deadly weapon,' they called it."

"No shit! You were really a robber?"

Ben winced; what he heard in the kid's voice was admiration.

"What was the deadly weapon?" Clem asked.

"There warn't no deadly weapon. I just had an empty pop bottle under my jacket, holdin' it to look like a gun."

Clem sat up in bed. "B-but...they caught you, they arrested you. Didn't they find out that all you had was a pop bottle?"

"Sure they did." By now Ben was too worn out to be bitter. "They said a pop bottle _could_ be a deadly weapon, 'cuz I _could_ break it an' slash someone with it."

"But you never had done nothin' like that?"

"No, an' I never would have. But that last grocer had a rifle under the counter, an' he called my bluff. Held me at gunpoint an' yelled for help till the law showed up. There was no way I could prove what I woulda done if the grocer hadn't had a better weapon than mine."

Clem asked the sensible question, "If you weren't willin' to hurt no one, why didn't you just burgle, break into stores at night?"

" 'Cuz with so much poverty, there'd been a lot o' break-ins, an' storekeepers had pretty much stopped leavin' cash in the till when they went home."

After the boy had thought about that for a minute or so, he asked, "Was it poverty made you a robber?"

"Damn right it was," Ben told him. "The Depression an' the climate changes ruined us. Our crops failed, my ma was gonna lose the farm she'd inherited from her folks..."

He hated talking about it, but he reminded himself again that this kid had told him everything. "Ma didn't have much use for me. I guess she thought I took after my old man, who'd deserted her." _That's true, as far as it goes._ "But I loved her anyway, y'know? So I left home - she was prob'ly glad to see me go - but then I stole money, an' I kept sneakin' back an' leavin' envelopes full o' money at her door. Never much, but it was somethin'. I never kept none for myself.

"I didn't know what she was doin' with it. Common sense woulda told her who was leavin' it, an' how I'd got it. I thought she might just burn it up. But maybe she'd keep it an' use it. Maybe she'd even convince herself it came from someone else, from kind neighbors. Not that we _had_ kind neighbors."

"Did you ever find out?" Clem asked him.

"Yeah," Ben said bleakly, "at my trial. Guess what? Every time Ma heard on the radio who'd been robbed, she went an' left the envelope at _their_ door. She _gave it all back_ , every friggin' dime, didn't even open the envelopes!" He realized he was crying, and hoped his young friend wouldn't notice.

"So it was _all for nothin'?_ " The kid was shaking his head in disbelief. "I know you ain't that much older'n me. Your ma gave all the money back, you never hurt no one or carried a real weapon, an' they still sentenced you to ten years in this place?"

"Right. It was all for nothin'. Plus, I learned at the trial that Ma's took ill. She needs me, but that didn't make no diff'rence neither." Ben took a deep breath, steadied his voice with an effort, and said, "There ain't much mercy in the world these days, Clem."


	3. Chapter 3

Nightmare Man was still screaming his pet word.

This time, instead of trying to drown him out or shut out the sound, Ben ran away from him.

Nightmare Man doggedly followed. He couldn't overtake the fleeing Ben, but Ben couldn't get out of range of his voice.

As with most dreams, the where and when of this one were vague. Yet Ben somehow knew that he hadn't been able to run, free and unimpeded, for a long time. It felt wonderful, so wonderful that he became totally caught up in the thrill of it. He forgot his pursuer and lived only to run.

Then, suddenly, something was restraining his flailing legs...

He sat up in bed with a moan. His moving in his sleep had made the shackles dig into both his ankles, probably drawing blood. The connecting chain had never seemed shorter.

But now, irony of ironies, he realized something else. After a dream from which he'd been able to banish Nightmare Man, he finally remembered the _word!_

And it was just as stupid as he'd thought it would be.

He muttered it under his breath.

"Whatcha sayin'?"

Ben hadn't realized Clem was awake. He shrugged, and repeated the word aloud.

Clem looked around, puzzled. "Where? How could you see it, anyway?" The guards kept a light on all night, to make a point of the prisoners' lack of privacy; but it was too low a wattage to be of much use.

"I didn't mention it 'cuz I saw it," Ben explained. "I mentioned it 'cuz I was dreamin' about it."

Clem gaped at him. "That's the sort o' thing you dream about? An' _scream_ about?" Edging toward the far side of his bed, he mumbled, "Maybe you really are crazy."

x

x

x

After breakfast the occupants of the bunkhouse were crowded into the back of a flatbed truck, as usual, for the drive to the day's work site. Two dozen of them, with all their chains linked together while they were in transit, to prevent escape attempts.

That struck Ben as unnecessary. How could anyone get away, when their individual leg chains forced them to walk like crippled old men?

He tried to put that out of his mind, and concentrate on the bright side of this particular day. The convicts were through with quarrying for a while, assigned to work on road repair. Traffic was being rerouted; they wouldn't be able to beg handouts from passing drivers, let alone try to seize vehicles. But they'd finally have nearby bushes behind which men could relieve themselves, without having to do it in full view of the guards. The thought of even that bit of privacy brought a smile to Ben's face.

On the other hand...one of those guards would be Teufel, newly rotated to the day shift. Having him around all day would be hell. _Guess I should thank God he won't be oglin' my package every time I take a leak._

Clem made an observation about the weather, and Ben found himself absurdly pleased that if the youngster had really thought he was crazy, he'd forgotten about it.

 _I'd hate to lose him as a friend. First real friend I've ever had._

x

x

x

By midday Ben was so hot that the sweat was pouring off him. He risked taking a break. Leaning on his shovel with one hand, he used the other to mop his brow with the uniform shirt he'd shed a while back.

 _Hell, I ain't needed to take one o' them nice private leaks all mornin'. It's been hours since they gave us water, an' I'm losin' what moisture I got this way._

He remembered, idly, that Clem actually had shuffled off to do his duty in the bushes.

 _How long ago was that?_

The heat might be addling his brain, but he thought Clem had been gone longer than he should have. _Passed out back there? Or..._ It suddenly dawned on him that he hadn't seen Teufel for a while, either.

Just as he was straightening, grim-faced, he heard a scream from deep in the roadside brush. "Ben! Help!"

He dropped his shirt in the gutter, but didn't let go of the shovel as he raced frantically into the bushes. He used it like a machete, thrusting branches and brambles aside as he moved faster than he ever had in his life.

 _How am I doin' this?_ He could feel the familiar weight of the cuffs on his ankles, but they weren't slowing him down at all!

It didn't matter. He didn't take time to look at his legs, just rushed in the direction from which he still heard intermittent shrieks.

 _Teufel wants to rape Clem. I told Clem how I stopped him, with that two-footed kick to the groin. The kid will try to stop him that way too, but he ain't nowhere near as strong as me. He'll get hisself killed!_

A shot rang out. Just one, with a horrible finality.

Ben froze for a second. Then he ran on, weeping, cursing. By now he heard other men crashing through the brush behind him - guards, of course, following his all-too-clear trail. But none of that mattered.

He burst into the clearing to see Clem's limp body sprawled face down, with a pool of blood under him. _Over_ him was Bull Teufel, taking no note of Ben as he spread Clem's legs so he could get into the position he wanted. _How can they be spread so wide apart, so easy?_ Normally, the shackles were only unlocked and one cuff removed while the men were getting their pants on and off, only removed completely for showering. Teufel shouldn't have had a key with him at the work site...

In any case, Clem's pants had already been pulled down below his buttocks, and Teufel's fly was open.

Ben was about to retch.

And then something in his mind went _click_.

 _Clem is dead. But I don't want Clem to be dead, an' I know how to make him not-dead. I was born knowin' how to make someone not-dead!_

He lunged at Teufel, and with one swing of his shovel, he bashed the brute's head in.

Then he stepped back, confused. _What just happened?_

Clem stirred, rolled over, and sat up. "Ben? Oh God, what -" He realized his pants were down, and began to whimper.

Ben was at his side in an instant. "Clem! You all right? Don't worry - I got here before he could rape you. How bad are you hurt?" It didn't seem serious, so Ben began hastily helping the kid pull his pants up.

"N-not at all, I guess. He fired a shot, an' he musta missed, though I can't see how. Maybe he just wanted to scare me. Then I ain't sure...maybe he hit me an' knocked me out...or maybe I just fainted..." Clem's voice trailed off as he spotted Teufel's body. "Oh, God. Is he d-dead?"

"Yeah, he's dead. I killed him." Ben took another look at the blood he'd seen under Clem, and decided the boy's visible scratches and bloodied nose must, somehow, have accounted for all of it. "You were out cold, an' I thought you were dead. I just lost it, took a wild swing at him with my shovel 'cuz I was so furious - an' that one blow killed him."

 _ **Of course** that's what happened!_

Someone came crashing out of the bushes. But as Ben spun around, meaning to shield Clem, he saw that it wasn't a guard. It was Whit Adams - running full tilt.

"Hawkins!" Adams paused, panting, to catch his breath. When he was able to speak, he said, "D'you understand what the hell's goin' on?"

Ben belatedly remembered the chains. Looking at Adams, he saw that the man still had leg irons on both ankles; but only a few of the chain links remained, and they didn't connect. He had complete freedom of movement.

Ben didn't need to look down to realize the same thing had happened to his chains - and Clem's.

"No," he said. It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth, either. _Could I possibly -? No, that's insane!_ He asked Adams, "Did everyone's chains break? An' how did it happen? I was distracted, just sort o' realized it after it was done."

"Yep, it was everyone. All at the same time. An' the chains didn't break, exactly, some o' the links just _crumbled_." Then Adams saw Teufel's body. "Oh, Jesus. You'd better get outta here. We'd all better get outta here!" And he was off.

As more sounds came from the surrounding brush - now clearly including the voices of guards - Ben pulled Clem to his feet. "He's right. C'mon, Clem, stick with me."

Clem made a move to pick up Ben's shovel. "We may need this -"

"No!" Ben grabbed him in time. "Don't touch that!"

"But we may have to defend ourselves -"

"Don't ask questions. We're leavin' it, y'hear? Now c'mon. _Run!_ "

 _Run with me, Clem, but leave the shovel. The weapon that's got my prints on it, an' no one else's. I don't know how long I'll be able to protect you. But one thing I **can** do is prevent your bein' charged with the murder o' Bull Teufel._

x

x

x

As they fled through the countryside, Ben realized that if he and Clem had been the only escapees, they wouldn't have stood a chance - even if they had somehow gotten rid of their chains. But with two dozen fugitives on the loose, running in all directions, warden and guards would be in a state of total confusion.

When they brought in bloodhounds, they might give priority to chasing the truly dangerous criminals. Even if they did focus on nabbing Teufel's killer, Adams' having left his scent at the scene would draw off some of the hounds.

 _But as soon as they run the prints on that shovel_ , Ben mused, _they'll zero in on me. So Clem an' me can't stay together long._ _I don't want him gettin' killed by accident when someone's gunnin' for me._

In the short term, Ben's know-how and common sense stood them both in good stead. He broke into a modest farmhouse when the family wasn't at home, so they could filch some food and clothing. He showed Clem how he forced the lock, and explained how he'd chosen the place and how much - or rather, how little - it was advisable to steal. ("For the time bein', till you can get your life straightened out, you'll need these skills to survive. Pick houses where you ain't gonna be seen by neighbors. Wait till you're sure no one's home. An' then, don't be greedy. If you just take a little food, or some wore-out clothes that look ready for the ragbag, the folks you burgle may not bother to report it.")

They visited another farm, in another county, to use the tools in the barn. Ben managed to get the leg irons off both Clem's ankles, and his own right ankle, before they heard the voices of approaching men.

Ben dropped everything. "Okay, gotta run for it!"

"But you've still got -"

"Never mind. I'll get it off later." _Or be buried wearin' it._ "Run!"

As they dashed through a cornfield, Clem was wailing, "They heard us! An' they'll see them leg irons we left!"

"Yeah. But don't worry. When they see we didn't steal nothin', they'll be too grateful to tell the law we were here." _I hope._

That night, as they hid out in an encampment of dispossessed Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, Ben told his friend they'd have to separate. "I'm sorry," he said, as he saw tears welling in Clem's eyes. "Maybe you should try to latch on with some o' these people. Don't go to your ma or your sister - those are the first places the law will look."

The boy pleaded, "Why can't I stay with you?"

"One reason," Ben said wearily, "is that I'll be the most wanted of all us fugitives, 'cuz it was me killed Teufel. You'd never be safe with me. An' besides that...I'm goin' to the first place they'll look for _me_. To _my_ ma's."

Clem sat up straighter. "Why, for God's sake? You just told me -"

"Yeah, I know. But my ma's sick. She needs me."

"Needs you to get killed?" Fortunately, before Ben had to think of an answer for that, the kid went on, "She don't even love you!"

Ben said quietly, "No, she never loved me. But think about this. Maybe a mother deserves _more_ credit for raisin' a kid she didn't want or love.

"For all I know, my ma coulda been raped. Whether or not that was what happened, she coulda tossed me in the trash the day I was born. There was no one else who gave a damn.

"But she raised me the best she could. She didn't show me no affection, but she didn't abuse me. An' I always had food an' clothes, till things got so bad that there warn't none for neither of us."

 _My ma brought me into this world. An' I can keep her from **leavin'** it - decades before her time - if she'll let me._

 _She may not let me. But I gotta try._

 _Goin' back there will prob'ly get **me** killed, one way or the other. But I still gotta try. Gotta show not so much her, as myself, that I ain't no spawn o' Satan._

 _I can't explain that to you, Clem. I wish I could. But you're better off, safer, not knowin'._

Clem couldn't understand Ben's reasons - the ones he'd admitted. He wouldn't have understood the others, either. Still only a boy, he cried himself to sleep.

Ben waited till after midnight. Then he made silent preparations to leave. But he paused for a last, sad look at his sleeping friend.

 _Damn. I know what's gonna happen to you. You'll get caught an' sent back to the chain gang. You'll admire some other hotshot young robber - an' he won't try to convince you it's a bad life. By the time you've served your ten years, you'll be a hardened criminal. This penal system **makes** hardened criminals._

 _I'm sorry, Clem. You deserved better._

He bent to smooth the younger teen's hair, then quietly slipped away.

x

x

x

Next day, as he trudged through the Dust Bowl toward his mother's farm, he was still puzzling over what had happened. He'd convinced himself Clem had never been dead; that wasn't the problem. What he couldn't understand - or didn't want to understand - was the sundering of the chains.

 _If I didn't have this leg iron on my ankle, I'd be thinkin' I may be so crazy that I imagined the whole thing._

But the leg iron was there, tangible proof. The chains had existed, and they'd "crumbled."

 _I know what makes chains crumble. But it shouldn't do it all at once, or in a matter of hours. It should take a long, long time._

And yet he couldn't shake the memory of Nightmare Man's screaming a certain word. Screaming it over and over until he, Ben, had finally gotten the message and spoken it aloud.

Spoken it aloud. As a verb, a _command?_

Shuddering, he whispered it again, under his breath.

 _"Rust."_

x

x

x

The End

x

x

x

 _Author's Afterword, updated 5/2/09:_ My idea that Avatars could command metal to rust (and the power over a mountainside that I attributed to Hack Scudder in my earlier story "Murder") were of course suggested by Ben's having discovered he could stop and restart a Black Blizzard.

All we had learned in Season 1 was that Ben was a chain gang escapee wanted for murder. It was often assumed that murder was the crime for which he'd been sentenced to the chain gang; but we didn't know that. (Harsh punishment was meted out for minor crimes in those days. The 1934 film _I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang_ is based on the true story of a man who was sentenced to ten years on a Georgia chain gang for taking part in an armed robbery that netted the destitute robbers $5.80.)

Later, series creator Daniel Knauf told fans his real intent was that Ben had been sentenced to the chain gang for "assaulting a bank officer" (who'd presumably come to foreclose on the family farm), and had killed a guard in the course of his escape.

Still a mystery: Management's enigmatic assertion, when Ben resisted the idea of killing someone else to bring Ruthie back to life, that _Ben had made that type of "one-life-over-another" choice before_. Many fans believe all it meant was that when he killed the guard in order to get home to his ailing mother, he was making a value judgment that his mother's life was more important than the guard's. (What did he intend to _do_ when he got home? Mr. Knauf has told us Ben had no thought of _healing_ his mother; he merely hoped to "help" her as any son might. He was in total denial regarding his powers.)

A final note: _Teufel_ is the German word for "devil," and there actually is an identically spelled surname. The name may have a different origin: the German word rhymes with "joyful," and I've only heard the name pronounced to rhyme with "ruffle." But I couldn't resist using it for this particular villain.


End file.
